Molecular Ethology, An Immodest Proposal for Semantic Clarification - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 157

FIGURE 8. Some examples of simple tesselations.
concept to include self-repair of certain computational elements which are
either stationary or freely moving in their tesselations, and Gordon Pask
(1962) developed similar ideas for discussing the social self-organization of
aggregates of such automata.
It may be noted that in all these studies ensembles of elements are con-
templated in order to achieve logical closure in discussing the proprietory
concept and autonomous property regarding the elements in question as,
e.g., self -replication, self -repair, self- organization, self -explanation, etc. This
is no accident, as Löfgren (1968) observed, for the prefix “self-” can be re-
placed by the term to which it is a prefix to generate a second-order concept,
a concept of a concept. Self-explanation is the explanation of an explanation;
self-organization is the organization of an organization (Selfridge, 1962), etc.
Since cognition is essentially a self-referring process (Von Foerster, 1969),
it is to be expected that in discussing its underlying mechanisms we have to
contemplate function of functions and structure of structures.
Since with the build-up of these structures their functional complexity
grows rapidly, a detailed discussion of their properties would go beyond the
scope of this article. However, one feature of these computational tessela-
tions can be easily recognized, and this is that their operational modalities
are closely linked to their structural organization. Here function and struc-
ture go hand in hand, and one should not overlook that perhaps the lion's
share of computing has been already achieved when the system's topology
is established (Werner, 1969). In organisms this is, of course, done mainly
by genetic computations.
This observation leads us directly to the physiology and physics of organic
tesselations.